Public Goods

PlantVillage is committed to the creation and protection of public goods for smallholder farmers around the world. We urgently need to reduce the loss of yield that comes from diseases, pests, poor soil, drought or other stresses. Often the science we need to help farmers is already known but it is not shared. However, many public institutions like CGIAR and FAO conduct research that is a public good and of significant importance to growers. At PlantVillage we want to make sure farmers can access that.

Another public good we want to create and make available to farmers are machine learning tools that allow for the automatic detection of crop stresses and the immediate transmission of advice that helps the farmer. PlantVillage is leading the way on this with the creation of expertly curated datasets of images to train machine learning algorithms. We consider these to be public goods which we curate.